The John Harvard Library, founded in 1959, publishes essential American writings, including novels, poetry, memoirs, criti-cism, and works of social and political history, representing all periods, from the beginning of settlement in America to the twenty- first century. The purpose of The John Harvard Library is to make these works available to scholars and general readers in affordable, authoritative editions.
N A R R A T I V E O F T H E L I F E O F
F R E D E R I C K D O U G L A S S
A N A M E R I C A N S L A V E
W R I T T E N B Y H I M S E L F I N T R O D U C T I O N B Y R O B E R T B . S T E P T O j o h n h a r v a r d l i b r a r y T H E B E L K N A P P R E S S O F H A R V A R D U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S Sa l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d Printed in the United States of America
Cataloging- in- Publication Data available from the Library of Congress
Introduction by Robert B. Stepto vii Note on the Text xxix
Chronology of Frederick Douglass’s Life xxxi
N A R R A T I V E O F T H E L I F E O F F R E D E R I C K D O U G L A S S Selected Bibliography 123
vii
Frederick Douglass Writes His Story
I
n 1845, the year the extraordinary memoir Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass was published, Douglass was twenty- seven years old and a fugitive slave. Which is to say, despite escaping from bondage in 1838, marrying and starting a family, and earning wages with his labor, despite his new life with a new name in Massa-chusetts, where he also found a new career as a spokesman for the abolitionist cause, Frederick Douglass was still a slave. This fact was announced at ev ery antislavery meeting—indeed, Douglass’s role at these meetings was to be The Slave Who Tells His Story—at the same time that certain details of Douglass’s story were suppressed: it was considered imprudent and dangerous for Douglass to offer his for-mer name, to name his master, or to reveal the county and state of his bondage, for that would in effect invite slave- catchers (or even “men- of- the- law”) to seize and abduct him back into the hell of slav-ery. Eventually, as Douglass tells us in the memoirs that came afterthe Narrative, his oral account of his story (related no doubt with increasing ease, wit, and irony) created more and more skepticism within his audiences: “People doubted if I had ever been a slave. They said I did not talk like a slave, look like a slave, nor act like a slave, and that they believed I had never been south of Mason’s and Dixon’s line.”1 The response of the abolitionists was both remarkable and
re-vealing. For their part, they pressed Douglass all the more to tell his story, urging him that it was “better to have a little of the plantation manner of speech than not” (MB 362).
This, then, is the context in which Douglass retired to Lynn, Mas-sachusetts, to write the Narrative. On the one hand, Douglass had de-cided to “tell all” and to confront the skeptics with the names and facts related to his bondage. As he declared in an address of 1845, he would mention the names “for the sake of the cause—for the sake of humanity,” adding, “I will mention the names and glory in running the risk.”2 Douglass knew full well that in publishing the names he
was ensuring that this information would become a matter of public record; he was answering his Northern critics and striking back at the Southern slaveholders to the greatest extent that his hard- won literacy afforded. But he was also striking back at the abolitionists, who did not contest his history as a slave but did have fixed ideas about Doug-lass’s role in the antislavery movement and about his place among them as a black man. In writing his story in the pages of the Narrative, Douglass was at one and the same time conforming to the abolition-ists’ insistence that he stick to his story and making certain that his relations with them would most certainly change. Somehow, Doug-lass intuitively knew that to write and craft his story as opposed to “telling it” was to compose and author himself. In doing so, he wrested his story from its “place” in the antislavery meeting agenda and cre-ated for it a life of its own.
This meant, of course, that Douglass had created for himself more of a life of his own. The publication of the Narrative, with all its reve-lations, forced him to flee for his safety to the British Isles for two years. But seen another way, the book’s publication allowed Douglass to get away and to be more of a speaker, intellectual, and leader, and more of a man, than the Boston abolitionists would have deemed ap-propriate.
In the course of pursuing his personal motivations for producing the Narrative, Douglass wrote a truly great American book. It is, as Benjamin Quarles declared years ago, “an American book in theme, in tone, and in spirit.”3 We see this especially in the ways the Narrative
par tic i pates in so many sub genres of American narrative literature. For example, the Narrative is arguably a captivity narrative, not just because it portrays the perils and af flic tions besetting a captive peo-ple, but also because it emphatically suggests that Douglass was saved from “the galling chains of slavery” because he was chosen. To be sure, Douglass was a “self- made man” (another veritable American theme Douglass embodied), but in the Narrative he clearly contends that he was put on the path to freeing himself by “a special interposition of divine Providence,” a “living word of faith and spirit of hope” that was a gift from God (NFD 42). While the immediate work of such declarations is to portray a faith that is liberating and in sharp con-trast to the hypocritical religion of slaveholders, the statements also place Douglass in the company of early American captivity narrativ-ists such as Mary Rowlandson and John Marrant, who were also cer-tain of their chosenness and of the power of their faith. Douglass’s beliefs as they are expressed in the Narrative are one reason his voice has been described as “preacherly”; they are also a reason the Narra-tive, among his other writings, is considered to have “a scriptural sig-nifi cance.”4
Douglass’s book is also an example of the great American tradi-tion of the cause narrative. The cause in Douglass’s written story is the abolition of slavery; more precisely it is the cause of promulgating the Garrisonian agenda for abolishing slavery. We see this from the beginning, when the authenticating documents (vouching for Doug-lass’s character, veracity, and so on) are provided by none other than William Lloyd Garrison himself and by Wendell Phillips, thus giving Garrison in particular the opportunity to proclaim a chief tenet of his abolitionist platform: “NO COMPROMISE WITH SLAVERY! NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS!” Other features of the Garriso-nian position appear later in the Narrative, as David Blight has ob-served: “Readers of the 1845 Narrative . . . will find many in flu ences of the Garrisonian doctrines, especially the attacks on religious hypoc-risy and the remarkable moment in Chapter 2 when Douglass com-pares trusted slaves who pleased overseers with the ‘slaves of political parties.’ . . . The book is as much an abolitionist polemic as it is a re-vealing autobiography.”5
Blight’s remarks direct us to consider that Douglass was pursu-ing two causes, the abolitionist cause and his own, autobiographical cause. In pursuing the former, Douglass was, in 1845, still enmeshed in the vocabulary and discourse of Garrison and other associates of the Massachusetts Anti- Slavery Society.
In writing autobiography, however, Douglass was trying some-thing new that could not be expressed by doctrine or slogan. While he was not exactly inventing a new language, he was forging a new mis-sion for his words, the mismis-sion of employing the written word in or-der to present himself (as Waldo Martin observes) as both a self- made man and a self- conscious hero.6 To be self- made is to claim American
citizenship, no matter what the laws of the land designate a fugitive slave to be; to be self- conscious is to present unabashedly one’s intel-ligence and humanity, which is the intelintel-ligence and humanity a whole
maligned race will cultivate once the beatings end and the chains are broken.
Insofar as Douglass represents his race in the Narrative, he par tic i-pates in yet another American narrative tradition, the narrative of representativeness or of the representative man. Douglass’s own pur-suit of this narrative is arresting because he portrays himself as a fig ure of the race’s degradation (“You have seen how a man was made a slave . . .”) as well as a fig ure of the race’s strength and charac-ter (“. . . you shall see how a slave was made a man”) (NFD 72). But his representativeness is accompanied by his exceptionalism. Indeed, Douglass’s experience is exceptional in that from boyhood to man-hood he lives within a rather benign form of slavery that offers, early on, few chores, access to a grandmother’s affections, and, later, the relative “freedoms” of being a city slave in Baltimore, including just enough freedom to become literate and to earn money for an escape north.
Douglass’s literacy be comes his most sought- after, prized, and ex-ceptional possession. In the Narrative, his language virtually cavorts as he describes exactly what he learns when Mr. Hugh Auld forbids his wife, Sophia Auld, to instruct young Frederick in “the A, B, C”:
Whilst I was saddened by the thought of losing the aid of my kind mistress, I was gladdened by the invaluable instruction which, by the merest accident, I had gained from my master. Though con-scious of the dif fi culty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read. The very decided manner in which he spoke, and strove to impress his wife with the evil consequences of giving me instruction, served to convince me that he was deeply sensible of the truths he was uttering. It gave me the best assurance that I might rely with the utmost con fi dence on the results which, he said, would flow from teaching me to read. What he most dreaded,
that I most desired. What he most loved, that I most hated. That which to him was a great evil, to be carefully shunned, was to me a great good, to be diligently sought. (NFD 45)
Each sentence of this lengthy quote presents a reversal, a kind of chiasmus, and the rhythmic repetition of these reversals or opposi-tions is the drumbeat of Douglass’s march to literacy and freedom. Robert O’Meally takes this point further: “this fig ure of speech, this verbal reversal, is important to the structure and meaning of Doug-lass’s whole book . . . For DougDoug-lass’s mission was not merely to write a nicely balanced set of sentences but to undermine and reverse a sys-tem of power relations.”7
It may also be said that Douglass seeks to undermine a system of power when he pursues one of the primary objectives of the 1845 Nar-rative, naming the places and personages of his enslavement. This he pursues throughout the book. There is power in naming, especially when a name appears in print to be forever associated with some atrocity. Thus we know by the end of Chapter 4 that Captain Anthony relished whipping slaves, notably the comely Aunt Hester, and that overseer Mr. Gore shot and killed a slave. Then there was Mr. Thomas Lanman, who killed two slaves, one with a hatchet. And oh yes, Mr. Giles Hick’s wife, who beat to death with a stick a teenage slave girl (a cousin of Douglass’s wife, Anna Murray Douglass), and Mr. Beal Bondly (ac tually, according to David Blight, his name was John Beal Bordley, Jr.), who shot an old slave man who drifted onto Bondly’s property while fishing. We sense that Douglass could have gone on in this vein were there not other lists he wanted to compose, for exam-ple, his list of slaveholders who were not only purportedly religious men but also men of the cloth. Such a list appears in Chapter 10. There we encounter the Rev. Daniel Weeden and the Rev. Rigby Hopkins, the latter known in the neighborhood for priding himself
on slave management, a “feature of his government” being that he whipped slaves “in advance of deserving it” (NFD 82). In this vein, Douglass also makes it known that Wright Fairbanks and Garrison [Garretson] West, both class leaders at their church, were the white men who violently broke up the Sabbath School that Douglass had or ga nized among the slaves and free black people.
While there is power in naming the names and writing them down, there is possibly a greater power in being able to comment on and otherwise play with the names of men whom Douglass could not have accosted verbally as a slave. Two examples readily come to mind: Douglass’s remarks early in the Narrative about Mr. Severe, and his “play” with Mr. Freeland’s name in Chapter 10. Records show that Douglass’s Mr. Severe spelled his name “Sevier.” While we must con-sider that Douglass did not know the exact spelling of “Sevier,” it is also quite tempting to think that he did know the spelling but chose “Severe” to vivify his portrait of slavery’s atrocities and to be true to his memory of the man. Douglass’s point is summed up in one sen-tence: “Mr. Severe was rightly named: he was a cruel man” (NFD 23). Mr. Freeland, in some mea sure, was the opposite of Mr. Severe; Doug-lass describes him as “the best master I ever had, till I became my own master” (NFD 86). Living with Mr. Freeland kindles the desire to be truly free, as Douglass indicates in this play on Freeland’s name: “At the close of the year 1834, Mr. Freeland again hired me of my master, for the Year 1835. But, by this time, I began to want to live upon free land as well as with Freeland; and I was no longer content, therefore, to live with him or any other slaveholder” (NFD 86). At the very least, we see in these passages Douglass remembering places and names and, in some fundamental way, wresting control of those memories by handling, and in that sense owning, the names of the people who once, in effect, owned him.
names of fig ures white and black who variously assisted him—is a way for Douglass to control the past, naming also plays a role in his forging of the future. It is noteworthy that with virtually each mea-sure of freedom achieved, Douglass contemplates his own name and renames himself. Here is an account of such renaming from the Nar-rative’s Chapter 11:
On the morning after our arrival at New Bedford, while at the breakfast table, the question arose as to what name I should be called by. The name given me by my mother was, “Frederick Au-gustus Washington Bailey.” I, however, had dispensed with the two middle names before I left Maryland so that I was generally known by the name of “Frederick Bailey.” I started from Baltimore bearing the name of “Stanley.” When I got to New York, I again changed my name to “Frederick Johnson,” and thought that would be the last change. But when I got to New Bedford, I found it necessary again to change my name . . . there were so many Johnsons in New Bed-ford, it was already quite dif fi cult to distinguish between them. I gave Mr. Johnson [an African American abolitionist benefactor] the privilege of choosing me a name, but told him he must not take from me the name of “Frederick.” I must hold on to that, to pre-serve a sense of my identity. Mr. Johnson had just been reading the “Lady of the Lake,” and at once suggested that my name be “lass.” From that time until now I have been called “Frederick Doug-lass.” (NFD 110)
Much is suggested here. Shedding his two middle names, probably in Baltimore while he was preparing for his escape, may be likened to an earlier moment when Douglass scrubbed off the “dead skin” and “mange” of slavery in preparation for his first trip to Baltimore: each action is a ritual cleansing. “Augustus” and “Washington,” not unlike “Pompey,” “Caesar,” and “Zeus,” and so on, are ultimately pompous, mocking given names in the context of slavery, no matter who
be-stows the names on a slave child. In planning his escape north, Doug-lass intended, in multiple senses of the term, to “travel light”; he did not need the “baggage” of “Augustus” and “Washington,” and so, with his new attentiveness to language, he edited his name accordingly. Douglass’s negotiation within and beyond the name of “Johnson” is equally fascinating. He eventually complains that he was a “John-son” in a horde of “Johnsons,” but wasn’t that at first desirable? Wouldn’t an escaping fugitive slave want in some mea sure to blend into the Northern black masses so as to be invisible and protected? It may well be that Douglass successfully makes his way from New York to New Bedford in part because he is at the time another Negro named Johnson. In New Bedford, however, apparently by the time of his first breakfast there, Douglass is already thinking that he is one of too many (African American) Johnsons in the neighborhood. In short, what he so poignantly realizes is that he no longer needs to be a Johnson in order to be free; he can choose his own, distinctive name. Of course, Douglass didn’t need to worry: he would have distin-guished himself whatever his surname. But it is striking that he wanted a new name, and that he asked a literate New Bedford (free) African American also named Johnson to direct him to his new name. That Mr. Johnson, who had been reading Sir Walter Scott’s “Lady of the Lake” (one wonders what Samuel Clemens may have later re-marked about this), suggested “Douglas” would seem faintly ridicu-lous if it weren’t for the fact that Douglas was a Scottish king and a “hero in search of lost patrimony,” like our Douglass, whose life’s journey was in part a search for a father and a fatherland.
In his essay on the 1845 Narrative, “A Psalm of Freedom,” David Blight reminds us that our readings of the Narrative are affected by the times we live in and by the issues at hand.8 Here I would like to comment on
how three books of the last de cade have led me to new assessments of the Narrative.
In 1997, Saidiya Hartman published her groundbreaking study Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Early on in her discussion, she makes it clear that she will not focus on the “terrible spectacles” in the literature of slav-ery, such as the murder of Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Un-cle Tom’s Cabin or the beating of Aunt Hester in Chapter 1 of Doug-lass’s 1845 Narrative, in great part because she worries about “the ease with which such scenes are usually reiterated, the casualness with which they are circulated, and consequences of this routine display of the slave’s ravaged black body.”9 Hartman instead sets her task as
follows:
Rather than try to convey the routinized violence of slavery and its aftermath through invocations of the shocking and the terrible, I have chosen to look elsewhere and consider those scenes in which terror can hardly be discerned—slaves dancing in the quarters, the outrageous darky antics of the minstrel stage, the constitution of humanity in slave law, and the fashioning of the self- possessed in-dividual. By defamiliarizing the familiar, I hope to illuminate the terror of the mundane and quotidian rather than exploit the shock-ing spectacle.10
For Douglass’s Narrative, she homes in on those moments when Douglass describes slaves reveling during the Christmas holidays or singing on their way to collect provisions at Great House Farm—mo-ments that some readers might interpret as evidence of slave content-ment, but that she reads as indications of the terrors and corrosions of slave life.
Hartman’s discussion is especially striking when she explores what she calls the “opacity of black song.” Black song has been “opaque” at
times for listeners and performers alike. For example, it can be ex-tremely dif fi cult to clarify, “with any degree of certainty or assured-ness, the politics of slave song and performance when dissolution and redress collude with one another and terror is yoked to enjoyment.”11
The opacity of black song is suggested in Douglass’s account (in Chapter 2) of the slaves singing on their way to Great House Farm:
While on their way, they would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness. . . . I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently inco-herent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see or hear. They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones long, loud, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. (NFD 25)
In this passage Douglass is clear about how “opaque” the songs were to him when he was a slave and “within the circle,” part of his point seeming to be that now that he is free and literate he comprehends and understands what was coherent in the songs: “testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.” It is not at all clear that ev ery one “without” the circle might “see or hear” as Douglass came to see and hear, but that, too, is one of his developing themes and exhortations: Become a good listener! Listen well! Enlist in the cause! Indeed, Douglass tells his reader, if you wish to be im-pressed with the “soul- killing effects of slavery,” place yourself in the deep pine woods near the Lloyd plantation on allowance- day, and, “in silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of [your] soul” (NFD 26).
Hester and the “wild notes” of slave songs, not one or the other event. Douglass was no doubt well aware of the provocative and distracting elements in his description of the beautiful Hester being stripped to the waist and beaten by a crazed, jealous white man, but he told the story anyway, not just because it was “the blood- stained gate, the en-trance to the hell of slavery, through which [he] was about to pass” (NFD 19), but because this was his aunt who was beaten! We are told of her plight in the context of Douglass’s telling, and showing, what pitiful semblance of a family slavery provided him. One could sup-pose that the family Douglass came to have in those early years was the “circle” of slaves who sing their laments in the woods. But that circle is described in ev ery way except in familial terms; the loudness and incoherence of the circle is for Douglass more frightening than familial. His tears in the present- day of his Narrative are occasioned by recalling the songs, and if the songs cause him to recall people, too, those people sadly enough are not iden ti fied as family. They are non-descript Negroes trapped in the claws of bondage.
The fact that Douglass wants us to hear right at the start Aunt Hester’s shrieks and the songs of slaves trudging through the woods leads me to a second book: The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech (2005), written by the Australian historians Shane White and Graham White (no re-lation to each other). In this study, a finalist for the 2005 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, White and White concentrate on the sounds the slaves made, in particular the field calls, songs, prayers, sermons, and the like, which were “the invigorating sounds of the reclamation of their humanity.”12 Not surprisingly, when they turn to Douglass’s 1845
Narrative, they are drawn to the passage under discussion in which slaves sing long and loud while en route to Great House Farm. Their attention to the sounds of the slaves heightens our awareness of Douglass’s commitment to a profoundly different proj ect: he wants
us to hear the sounds the slaveholders made; he indicts slavery by forcing us to listen to the cacophony that accompanies race oppres-sion.
Consider, for example, the sounds of slavery emanating from Chapter 2 of the Narrative. There, Douglass describes how the slave’s work day begins with the blare of the slave driver’s horn: “At the sound of this, all must rise, and be off to the field . . . and woe betides them who hear not this morning summons” (NFD 23). Those who hear not the horn are whipped, and so another sound that fills the air is the whistling of the whip interlarded with the cries of the beaten. The paragraph in which we learn this is also the one in which the overseer, Mr. Severe, is introduced, the sound of his name being unto itself a sound of bondage. Mr. Severe, we are told, is prodigiously pro-fane as well as cruel, which introduces one of Douglass’s key themes: whatever the venue, the country or the city, the profanity of the slave-holders is a sound of slavery.
When Mr. Severe dies, he is replaced by a Mr. Hopkins, who doesn’t last long as the overseer. Douglass suggests that Mr. Hopkins was deemed inadequate precisely because he was not only less cruel than Mr. Severe but also less profane. After Hopkins comes Mr. Gore, an-other of Douglass’s aptly named overseers. In portraying Gore, Doug-lass dwells on his “sharp, shrill voice,” the sound of which produces “horror and trembling” among the slaves. The portrait continues: “Mr. Gore was a grave man, he indulged in no jokes, said no funny words, seldom smiled. His words were in perfect keeping with his looks, and his looks were in perfect keeping with his words. Overseers will sometimes indulge in a witty word, even with the slaves; not so with Mr. Gore. He spoke but to command, and commanded but to be obeyed; he dealt sparingly with his words, and bountifully with his whip” (NFD 34).
and indeed, what comes next is Douglass’s account of Mr. Gore’s shooting and killing a slave named Demby. Demby’s offense was that he did not obey the command—the sound—of his “master’s voice” (the “master” in this instance being Gore).
The account of the event could have ended there, but Douglass, as shrewd a commentator as one might find, adds to his story an-other sound of slavery: that of Gore’s words of jus tifi ca tion for killing Demby. Douglass writes, “His [Gore’s] reply [to Colonel Lloyd] was, (as well as I can remember,) that Demby had become unmanageable” (NFD 35). Note Douglass’s inserted phrase “(as well as I can remem-ber,).” This is a personal moment, an autobiographical moment, for Douglass: as a slave, he personally has heard the noisome noise of slavery and of a slave’s murder verbally exonerated. It is another mo-ment, like that in which he overhears Mr. Auld forbidding his ABC lessons, when Douglass earns a deeper knowledge of slavery by eaves-dropping on men of power trying to explain themselves.
In one of the most polemical passages at the end of the Narrative, Douglass writes about how quiet he found the North to be after en-during slavery in the South. Here, for example, is how he describes the wharves of New Bedford:
Lying at the wharves, and riding in the stream, I saw many ships of the finest model, in the best order, and of the largest size. Upon the right and left, I was walled in by granite warehouses of the widest dimensions, stowed to their utmost capacity with the necessaries and comforts of life. Added to this, almost ev ery body seemed to be at work, but noiselessly so, compared to what I had been accus-tomed to in Baltimore. There were no loud songs heard from those engaged in loading and unloading ships. I heard no deep oaths or horrid curses on the laborer. I saw no whipping of men [Doug-lass could have added that he heard no whipping of men]; but all seemed to go smoothly on. Every man appeared to understand his
work, and went at it with a sober, yet cheerful earnestness . . . To me this looked exceedingly strange. (NFD 111)
Douglass is no doubt exaggerating the quietude (and model ef fi-ciency) of the scene, but it is an understandable exaggeration, given his zeal for abolition and his personal gratitude for being in a new locale, a new life.
If Douglass marvels at the scene in New Bedford, it is because his own nightmarish memories of working in the shipyards of Baltimore are so vivid. At one point, he tells of being hired to a Mr. William Gardner, ship builder. His orders from Mr. Gardner were “to do what-ever the carpenters commanded [him] to do.” That meant that Doug-lass was at “the beck and call of about seventy- five men” and that he was to regard them all as masters. Douglass recalls being “called a dozen ways in the space of a single minute. Three or four voices would strike my ear at the same moment.” It would sound like this: “Fred., come help me to cant this timber here.”—“Fred., come carry this tim-ber yonder.”—“Fred., bring that roller here.”—“Fred., go get a fresh can of water.”—“Fred., come help saw off the end of this timber.” —“Fred., go quick, and get the crowbar.” As the passage continues, Douglass makes certain to let us know that he wasn’t always called “Fred,” to wit: “Halloo, nigger! come, turn this grindstone.” . . . I say, darky, blast your eyes, why don’t you heat up some pitch?” . . . “Hold on where you are! Damn you, if you move, I’ll knock your brains out!” (NFD 95). This went on for some eight months.
Douglass’s recollections of his work at Gardner’s Shipyard con firm that a slave’s work in the city could be as demeaning, brutalizing, and noisy as a slave’s work in the fields. They also help us understand why Douglass would declare that, compared with what he experienced in Baltimore, the wharves at New Bedford were “noiseless.” The wharves of both cities emitted the din of work, but it was Douglass’s Baltimore
that was markedly louder, for it was there that he was assaulted by the sounds of slavery.
The fact that Douglass, in writing the Narrative, has achieved the day when he can ac tually compare the conditions of Northern and Southern cities reminds us that his story is one of expanding geog-raphies, of bursting beyond the narrow con fines, geographical and mental, imposed by slavery to keep a slave “world- stupid.” It is Doug-lass’s great good fortune that he sees and experiences Baltimore at a young age; he knows from then on that there are, even in slavery, other places to live and other ways to live. Traveling to and from Bal-timore is arguably even more important to Douglass than residing there. Once aboard a Chesapeake sloop, young Douglass experiences firsthand the near- spiritual lift of wind and wave as well as the practi-cal knowledge of seeing and mentally recording which way the steam-boats turn when they sail north. Douglass’s expanding knowledge of an American ge og ra phy can be no more curtailed than his expanding ability to read and write: in the words of a famous Robert Hayden poem, he “Mean mean mean to be free.”13
The phrase “world- stupid” comes from the pages of Edward P. Jones’s novel The Known World, which won the National Book Award in 2003. This is an important book, more important than its prizes. It presents, among other main characters, Moses, a black slave who be comes the overseer on the plantation owned by Henry Town send, a black slaveholder in Virginia. Moses is, as a fellow slave named Elias, who hates him, says, “world- stupid,” so neither the roads nor the heavens mean anything to him. Eventually, the slaves he oversees mock him, saying things like, “Come on outa there, Mr. Moses man / Come on out and lead us to the Promise Land”; and as Jones’s narrator notes, “People laughed, even the children.”14 In contrast, Douglass in
or in the pro cess of becoming so. An early moment in that pro cess— a blues moment—is unforgettably described by Douglass as a time when he did not know the days of the month or the months of the year, but did know that he had to look for home elsewhere (NFD 41). This is the rationale he gives for spending a day in the bow of a sloop, looking ahead, when he was first shipped to Baltimore.
In Chapter 8 of the Narrative, Douglass is unexpectedly returned to the Anthonys and to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation. Captain Anthony has died and the entire property, including young Frederick (now about eleven years old), must be “valuated.” This event nakedly re-minds Frederick that he is property and that he might find himself permanently returned to plantation life and to the cruelties of that condition. He observes that the other slaves are not as agitated as he is and offers this explanation: “I had known what it was to be kindly treated; they had known nothing of the kind. They had seen little or nothing of the world. They were in very deed men and women of sor-row, and acquainted with grief ” (NFD 55–56). Striking in that remark is the suggestion that the other slaves were “world- stupid,” something that Douglass, even at age eleven, is determined not to be. His good fortune is that when the valuation is completed and the property newly divided, he is sent back to Baltimore. Two years later, however, family quarrels among Douglass’s masters and mistresses lead to his removal from the Auld household in Baltimore and return to the plantations of St. Michael’s. It is during that voyage on the Chesa-peake that Douglass makes careful note of “the direction which the steamboats took to go to Philadelphia.” He adds, “I deemed this knowledge of the utmost importance. My determination to run away was again revived” (NFD 59).
Douglass’s dream of freedom, and of freedom being found and facilitated by wind and wave, is what sustains him in the nadir of
his enslavement, his year with the “slave- breaker,” Mr. Covey. Covey’s plantation was hell itself, but a hell near the water. And so Douglass writes:
Our house stood within a few rods of the Chesapeake Bay, whose broad bosom was ever white with sails from ev ery quarter of the habitable globe . . . I have often, in the deep stillness of a summer’s Sabbath, stood all alone upon the lofty banks of that noble bay, and traced, with saddened heart and tearful eye, the countless number of sails moving off to the mighty ocean. The sight of these always affected me powerfully. My thoughts would compel utterance; and there, with no audience but the Almighty, I would pour out my soul’s complaint, in my rude way, with an apostrophe to the mov-ing multitude of ships. (NFD 71)
With these words Douglass introduces the apostrophe that William Lloyd Garrison appraised in 1845 as the most thrilling of the Narra-tive’s “many passages of eloquence and power” (NFD 7). Many other readers over more than 150 years have offered similar praise. Rather than present a sizeable portion of that impassioned speech, I direct you to these three short sentences from the middle of the address: “It cannot be that I will live and die a slave. I will take to the water. This very bay shall yet bear me into freedom” (NFD 72). Little wonder, then, that the plan for the (thwarted) 1835 escape attempt involved first going up the bay by canoe.
One would think that in this ge og ra phy of slavery the worst site of terror (and hence the space most distinct from the Chesapeake shore) would be Covey’s plantation. But the plantation, perhaps because it is a work place, is presented as something of a liminal space, a space where a man can be worked as a slave but also where a slave can work to become a man. Indeed, it is in Covey’s stable in the heart of the plantation that Douglass quickens into manhood and strikes back at
Covey, bloodying him in their epic two- hour battle. For Douglass, the site of unabated terror is the “thick wood,” which he immediately iden ti fies as “a place new to me.” What is certainly new to him is to be taken into the wood by Covey for merciless beatings. The beatings begin right after Douglass arrives at Covey’s plantation and continue right up through the thrashing that occasions Douglass’s pitiful at-tempt to secure the protection of his master (Thomas Auld), who had hired him out to Covey. There are stories of slaves find ing a respite from slavery in the deep woods and similar places. Douglass gestures toward those stories in relating that a slave named Sandy took him to “another part of the woods, where there was a certain root, which, if I would take some of it with me, carrying it always on my right side, it would render it impossible for Mr. Covey, or any other white man, to whip me” (NFD 76). He even goes so far as to declare that on the day of his marathon battle with Covey “the virtue of the root was fully tested” (NFD 76). But that is as far as Douglass goes in rendering this portion of his Narrative a “conjure story.” His struggle with Covey is to be a story of manhood, not of magic.15
Obviously, Douglass, as a slave, does not know as much about the world as he will come to know once he flees from bondage, but what does he know when he is sixteen or seventeen years of age and begin-ning in earnest to plot his escape? How world- smart is he while living in circumstances determined to keep him “world- stupid”? Douglass is quite explicit about what he and the brave souls planning to escape with him knew in 1835:
We could see no spot this side of the ocean, where we could be free. We knew nothing about Canada. Our knowledge of the north did not extend farther than New York; and to go there, and be forever harassed with the frightful liability of being returned to slavery— with the certainty of being treated tenfold worse than before—
the thought was truly a horrible one, and one which it was not easy to overcome. The case sometimes stood thus: At ev ery gate through which we were to pass, we saw a watchman—at ev ery ferry a guard—on ev ery bridge a sentinel—and in ev ery wood a patrol. We were hemmed in on ev ery side. (NFD 87)
With these words, Douglass maps geographies and anxieties, the one being impossible to describe without the other. In passages such as this one, he tells a special truth about the ordeal of slavery, a truth about the mental travail of bondage.
Douglass’s audiences of the 1840s wanted him fi nally to divulge the “facts” of his servitude—the names, the places, the dates. In writing the Narrative, Douglass supplied those facts, but he also challenged the conventional expectations of what exactly a fact of slavery might be. This occurred because he was writing a narrative that was to be as personal as it was historical. Douglass’s 1845 Narrative is a great Amer-ican book because it is a great AmerAmer-ican autobiography. Like so many fine autobiographers who followed him, Douglass knew that both his “objective” facts and his “subjective” facts were true, and that offering both was a key to telling his story well. Telling his story was part of daring to be free. Writing his story was a next step in inventing him-self, a step con firming his hard- won literacy and his intention to take his place in the world.
Notes
1. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855, reprint, New York: Dover, 1969), p. 362. All future page references are to this edition and are accompanied by the letters “MB.”
2. Frederick Douglass, “My Slave Experience in Maryland: An Address Delivered in New York, New York, on 6 May 1845,” in John W. Blassingame, ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers, series 1, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale Univer-sity Press, 1979), pp. 27–34.
3. Benjamin Quarles, “Introduction,” in Frederick Douglass, Narrative
of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845,
reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960), p. xix. All future page references are to the present edition and are accompa-nied by the letters “NFD.”
4. Robert O’Meally, “Frederick Douglass’ 1845 Narrative: The Text Was Meant to Be Preached,” in Dexter Fisher and Robert B. Stepto, eds.,
Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction (New York: Modern
Language Association, 1978), pp. 192–211; Quarles, “Introduction,” p. xix; David Blight, “Introduction: A Psalm of Freedom,” in Frederick Douglass,
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845, reprint, New York: Bedford Books, 1993), pp. 1–23.
5. Blight, “Introduction,” p. 8.
6. Waldo Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: Univer-sity of North Carolina Press, 1984), pp. 253–278.
7. Robert O’Meally, “Introduction: Crossing Over: Frederick Douglass’s Run for Freedom,” in Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845, reprint, New York:
Barnes and Noble, 2003), p. xxvi. 8. Blight, “Introduction,” pp. 18–19.
9. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and
Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press,
1997), p. 3. 10. Ibid., p. 4.
11. Ibid., p. 35.
12. Shane White and Graham White, The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering
African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech (Boston:
Beacon, 2005), p. ix.
13. Robert Hayden, “Runagate, Runagate,” in Frederick Glaysher, ed.,
Robert Hayden Collected Poems (New York: Liveright, 1985), p. 59.
14. Edward P. Jones, The Known World (New York: Amistad Harper Collins, 2003), p. 332.
15. In 1888, forty- three years after Douglass shared his story about a slave named Sandy and the special root that could protect a slave from white folks, Charles W. Chesnutt published “Po’ Sandy,” a conjure story in which Sandy’s wife, a conjure woman named Tenie, turns him into a tree in the hope of giving him some respite from the master. Unfortunately, Sandy is milled into boards for a new kitchen. Their stories are different, but might it
be that Douglass’s story about a slave named Sandy occasioned Chesnutt’s story? Chesnutt was well versed in Douglass’s writings and career. He authored the biography of Douglass in the Beacon Biographies of Eminent Americans series: Charles W. Chesnutt, Frederick Douglass (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1899).
xxix Douglass’s Narrative was published by the Anti- Slavery Office in Bos-ton in 1845. The book’s initial print run of 5,000 copies was sold in four months. Four more printings of 2,000 copies each appeared within a year. Additional reprintings occurred in 1848 and 1849. In the British Isles five variant printings appeared, two in Ireland in 1845 and 1846 and three in En gland in 1846 and 1847. The present text fol-lows the first edition published in Boston.
xxxi 1818 Born in February (exact date unknown) at Holme Hill Farm, in Talbot
County, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, the son of Harriet Bailey, a slave, and a white father rumored to have been Douglass’s master, Aaron Anthony. Named Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. Older siblings are a brother, Perry, born in 1813, and two sisters, Sarah, born in 1814, and Eliza, born in 1816. A youn ger sister Kitty is born in 1820 and a second, Arianna, is born in 1822. Douglass rarely sees his mother, who works on a nearby farm. He is raised by his grandparents Betsy and Isaac Bailey on Holme Hill Farm.
1824 Sent to St. Michael’s, Maryland, to work on the Lloyd plantation, man-aged by Aaron Anthony. There the six- year- old Douglass joins his older siblings. He is chosen to be the companion of Daniel Lloyd, youngest son of the plantation’s owner, and learns “white” habits of speech.
1826 Mother dies. He is sent to Baltimore, where he works as a houseboy and an unskilled laborer for Hugh Auld, a ship carpenter and the brother of Thomas Auld, Anthony’s son- in- law. Anthony dies on No-vember 14, having neglected to leave a will.
1827 Asks his mistress, Sophia Auld, to teach him to read, and he learns the alphabet and a few simple words. When Hugh Auld learns of the les-sons he stops them immediately, but Douglass continues learning on his own. In October he is sent to Holme Hill Farm, for the division of Anthony’s twenty- nine slaves. Douglass is awarded to Thomas Auld, who sends him back to Hugh and Sophia Auld.
1831 Has a religious awakening and joins the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore. Having saved fifty cents, he purchases a used copy of The Columbian Orator, a collection of great speeches on issues such as liberty, equality, and justice. He learns about the abo-litionist movement when he reads a newspaper account of antislavery petitions.
1833 Sent to St. Michael’s in Talbot County to work for Thomas Auld, and learns that his sister Sarah was sold in 1832 to a planter in Mississippi. He helps or ga nize a Sunday school for “the instruction of such slaves as might be disposed to read the New Testament.” The meetings are soon broken up by local whites who “came upon us with sticks and other missiles, drove us off, and forebade us to meet again.”
1834 Auld hires out Douglass as a field hand to a poor farmer, Edward Covey, who has the reputation of being a brutal “nigger- breaker.” Re-ceives repeated whippings at Covey’s hands. After months of ill treat-ment, Douglass in a “turning- point” stands up to Covey and beats him in a fight. The beating he administers “rekindled the few expiring em-bers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own man-hood.”
1835 Hired out to Willam Freeland, whom Douglass later calls “the best master I ever had, till I became my own master.”
1836 After an unsuccessful attempt to escape, sent by Thomas Auld to Balti-more, returning to the household of Hugh and Sophia Auld. He is put to work in shipyards.
1837 Joins the East Baltimore Mental Improvement Society, a debating club whose other members are free black men. Through membership in the society, he meets and falls in love with Anna Murray, a free black woman who works as a housekeeper in Baltimore.
1838 On September 3 escapes from slavery by borrowing a free black sailor’s protection papers and impersonating him. Arrives in New York City
on September 4, changing his name to Frederick Johnson to avoid capture. Anna Murray joins him in New York, and they marry on Sep-tember 15. The ceremony is performed by Presbyterian minister James W. C. Pennington, who is also an escaped slave from Maryland. The couple moves to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where Douglass works as an unskilled laborer. He again changes his name, this time to Doug-lass.
1839 In New Bedford works as a warehouseman and shipyard laborer and subscribes to William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist weekly The
Libera-tor. He hears Garrison speak in New Bedford in April. Douglass
be-comes a licensed preacher for the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. A daughter, Rossetta, is born on June 24.
1840 A son, Lewis Henry, is born on October 9.
1841 Speaks at an antislavery meeting in New Bedford. Abolitionist Wil-liam C. Coffin invites Douglass to talk about his life as a slave at a Massachusetts Anti- Slavery Society convention on Nantucket. Doug-lass’s speech is followed by an impassioned and encouraging response from William Lloyd Garrison. The Society hires Douglass as a speaker. He be comes closely allied with Garrison.
1842 Makes numerous speeches in New En gland and New York State, nar-rating his story and attacking slavery and racism. A second son, Fred-erick, is born on March 3.
1843 Beaten by a mob during an antislavery meeting in Pendleton, Indiana. His right hand is broken in the scuffle and he never fully recovers the use of that hand.
1844 A third son, Charles Remond, is born October 21.
1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written
by Himself is published by the Anti- Slavery Office in Boston in May.
The Narrative’s initial print run of 5,000 copies sells out in four months. He meets Susan B. Anthony while on a speaking tour of New York. Having revealed his identity and fearing capture as a fugitive slave, Douglass embarks on an extended speaking tour of the British Isles.
1846 En glish friends raise money to purchase his freedom. Douglass is manumitted on December 12 after Hugh Auld receives $711.66 in pay-ment.
1847 Returns from overseas tour and is reunited with his family. He moves to Rochester, New York, where he begins to publish a reformist weekly,
The North Star.
1848 Is the only man to take a prominent part in the proceedings of the equal rights for women convention held at Seneca Falls, New York, in July, a meeting that formally inaugurates the woman’s rights move-ment in America and marks the beginning of Douglass’s long associa-tion with that cause. He shelters slaves escaping to Canada; meets and be comes an acquaintance of John Brown.
1849 A second daugher, Annie, is born on March 22. Douglass hires a tutor to teach his wife, Anna, to read but the lessons are a failure and she remains nearly illiterate.
1851 Merges North Star with Gerrit Smith’s Liberty Party Paper to form
Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Argues that the Constitution is an
antislav-ery document, reversing his earlier statements that it was proslavantislav-ery, an opinion once shared with William Lloyd Garrison. This change of opinion, as well as his view that both moral exhortation and political action are required to abolish slavery, cause a rift between Douglass and Garrison.
1855 My Bondage and My Freedom, his second autobiography, is published by Miller, Orton, and Mulligan in New York.
1857 In Dred Scott v. Sandford, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that African Americans are not U.S. citizens and that Congress has no authority to restrict slavery in U.S. territories.
1858 Entertains John Brown for three weeks as a house guest and the two discuss Brown’s plan to raise armed bands that will aid slaves in their escape north.
1859 On August 19 meets John Brown in a quarry near Chambersberg, Pennsylvannia, and learns of Brown’s plan to seize the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and arm slaves in the surrounding country-side. Declines to help Brown, believing the effort is doomed. On Octo-ber 16 Brown enacts his plan. Federal troops capture Brown, and he is eventually tried and hanged. Authorities discover among Brown’s pa-pers a letter from Douglass, who flees to Canada and then to En gland to escape arrest on charges of being an accomplice in Brown’s raid.
1860 Daughter Annie dies in Rochester. Douglass returns to the United States and is not charged in the John Brown raid. He campaigns for Abraham Lincoln, who is elected president in November.
1861 On April 12 the Civil War begins when South Carolinian guns open fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor.
1863 Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1. The proclamation declares “that all persons held as slaves” within the re-bellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.” Douglass be comes a recruiter for the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the first regiment of black soldiers; his sons Lewis and Charles are among the recruits. Meets with President Lincoln to discuss the unequal pay and poor treatment received by black soldiers.
1864 Has second White House audience with Lincoln. Lincoln asks Doug-lass to form an or ga ni za tion to assist slaves escaping to the North, in the event of a negotiated peace.
1865 Attends the White House reception following Lincoln’s second inau-guration. On April 9 General Robert E. Lee surrenders the Confeder-ate Army of Northern Virginia to Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, in the town of Appomattox Court House. Lincoln is assassinated on April 14. On December 5 Congress ratifies the Thirteenth Amend-ment, outlawing slavery in the United States.
1866 Attacks President Johnson’s Reconstruction policies. Leads a delega-tion of black leaders to visit President Johnson to push for black suf-frage.
1870 Is featured speaker at celebrations of the rati fi ca tion of the Fifteenth Amendment, which gives blacks the right to vote.
1872 The Douglass’s Rochester home is destroyed by fire. No one is injured but many of Douglass’s papers are lost. Attributing the fire to arson, he moves the family to Washington, D.C.
1874 Be comes president of troubled Freedman’s Savings and Trust Com-pany, a bank that was founded to encourage black Americans to save and invest money. The bank is insolvent and the trustees soon move to close it.
Monument to Abraham Lincoln (black Americans raised more than $16,000 for the building of the monument).
1877 Appointed by President Hayes as United States Marshal for the Dis-trict of Columbia, a post he holds until 1881. Returns to Talbot County, Maryland, where he visits relatives and meets with his former owner, Thomas Auld, who is dying.
1881 Appointed by President Garfield as Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia, a post he holds until 1886. Publishes his third and final autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, with the Park Publishing Company in Hartford, Connecticut.
1882 His wife, Anna, dies on August 4 after suffering a stroke a month ear-lier.
1883 Leads a chorus of condemnation of the Supreme Court when it de-clares the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional.
1884 On January 24 marries Helen Pitts, a white woman who worked as a clerk in the Recorder of Deeds of fice. The interracial marriage causes controversy among Douglass’s friends, family, and the public.
1891 Appointed by President Harrison as Minister- Resident and Consul- General to the Republic of Haiti, and Chargé d’Affaires for Santo Do-mingo.
1894 On January 9 at the Metropolitan African Methodist Epsicopal Church in Washington delivers what will be his last major speech, “The Les-sons of the Hour,” a denunciation of lynchings.
1895 Dies of a heart attack in Washington, D.C., on February 25, upon re-turning home after speaking at a woman’s rights meeting. He is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester beside his first wife, Anna, and his daughter Annie.
1
I
n the month of August, 1841, I attended an anti- slavery con-vention in Nantucket, at which it was my happiness to become acquainted with Frederick Douglass, the writer of the following Narrative. He was a stranger to nearly ev ery member of that body; but, having recently made his escape from the southern prison- house of bondage, and feeling his curiosity excited to ascertain the prin-ciples and mea sures of the abolitionists,—of whom he had heard a somewhat vague description while he was a slave,—he was induced to give his attendance, on the occasion alluded to, though at that time a resident in New Bedford.Fortunate, most fortunate occurrence!—fortunate for the millions of his manacled brethren, yet panting for deliverance from their aw-ful thraldom!—fortunate for the cause of negro emancipation, and of universal liberty!—fortunate for the land of his birth, which he has already done so much to save and bless!—fortunate for a large circle
of friends and acquaintances, whose sympathy and affection he has strongly secured by the many sufferings he has endured, by his vir-tuous traits of character, by his ever- abiding remembrance of those who are in bonds, as being bound with them!—fortunate for the multitudes, in various parts of our republic, whose minds he has en-lightened on the subject of slavery, and who have been melted to tears by his pathos, or roused to virtuous indignation by his stirring elo-quence against the enslavers of men!—fortunate for himself, as it at once brought him into the field of public usefulness, “gave the world assurance of a man,” quickened the slumbering energies of his soul, and consecrated him to the great work of breaking the rod of the op-pressor, and letting the oppressed go free!
I shall never forget his first speech at the convention—the extraor-dinary emotion it excited in my own mind—the powerful impression it created upon a crowded auditory, completely taken by surprise— the applause which followed from the beginning to the end of his fe-licitous remarks. I think I never hated slavery so intensely as at that moment; certainly, my perception of the enormous outrage which is in flicted by it, on the godlike nature of its victims, was rendered far more clear than ever. There stood one, in physical proportion and stature commanding and exact—in intellect richly endowed—in nat-ural eloquence a prodigy—in soul manifestly “created but a little lower than the angels”—yet a slave, ay, a fugitive slave,—trembling for his safety, hardly daring to believe that on the American soil, a single white person could be found who would befriend him at all hazards, for the love of God and humanity! Capable of high attain-ments as an intellectual and moral being—needing nothing but a comparatively small amount of cultivation to make him an ornament to society and a blessing to his race—by the law of the land, by the voice of the people, by the terms of the slave code, he was only a piece of property, a beast of burden, a chattel personal, nevertheless!
A beloved friend from New Bedford prevailed on Mr. Douglass to address the convention. He came forward to the platform with a hesitancy and embarrassment, necessarily the attendants of a sensi-tive mind in such a novel position. After apologizing for his igno-rance, and reminding the audience that slavery was a poor school for the human intellect and heart, he proceeded to narrate some of the facts in his own history as a slave, and in the course of his speech gave utterance to many noble thoughts and thrilling re flections. As soon as he had taken his seat, filled with hope and admiration, I rose, and declared that Patrick Henry, of revolutionary fame, never made a speech more eloquent in the cause of liberty, than the one we had just listened to from the lips of that hunted fugitive. So I believed at that time—such is my belief now. I reminded the audience of the peril which surrounded this self- emancipated young man at the North,— even in Massachusetts, on the soil of the Pilgrim Fathers, among the descendants of revolutionary sires; and I appealed to them, whether they would ever allow him to be carried back into slavery,—law or no law, constitution or no constitution. The response was unanimous and in thunder- tones—“NO!” “Will you succor and protect him as a brother- man—a resident of the old Bay State?” “YES!” shouted the whole mass, with an energy so startling, that the ruthless tyrants south of Mason and Dixon’s line might almost have heard the mighty burst of feeling, and recognized it as the pledge of an invincible deter-mination, on the part of those who gave it, never to betray him that wanders, but to hide the outcast, and firmly to abide the conse-quences.
It was at once deeply impressed upon my mind, that, if Mr. Doug-lass could be persuaded to consecrate his time and talents to the pro-motion of the anti- slavery enterprise, a powerful impetus would be given to it, and a stunning blow at the same time in flicted on north-ern prejudice against a colored complexion. I therefore endeavored to
instil hope and courage into his mind, in order that he might dare to engage in a vocation so anomalous and responsible for a person in his situation; and I was seconded in this effort by warm- hearted friends, especially by the late General Agent of the Massachusetts Anti- Slavery Society, Mr. John A. Collins, whose judgment in this instance en-tirely coincided with my own. At first, he could give no encourage-ment; with unfeigned diffidence, he expressed his conviction that he was not adequate to the performance of so great a task; the path marked out was wholly an untrodden one; he was sincerely appre-hensive that he should do more harm than good. After much delib-eration, however, he consented to make a trial; and ever since that period, he has acted as a lecturing agent, under the auspices either of the American or the Massachusetts Anti- Slavery Society. In labors he has been most abundant; and his success in combating prejudice, in gaining proselytes, in agitating the public mind, has far surpassed the most sanguine expectations that were raised at the commence-ment of his brilliant career. He has borne himself with gentleness and meekness, yet with true manliness of character. As a public speaker, he excels in pathos, wit, comparison, imitation, strength of reasoning, and flu ency of language. There is in him that union of head and heart, which is indispensable to an enlightenment of the heads and a win-ning of the hearts of others. May his strength continue to be equal to his day! May he continue to “grow in grace, and in the knowledge of God,” that he may be increasingly ser viceable in the cause of bleeding humanity, whether at home or abroad!
It is certainly a very remarkable fact, that one of the most ef fi cient advocates of the slave population, now before the public, is a fugitive slave, in the person of Frederick Douglass; and that the free col-ored population of the United States are as ably represented by one of their own number, in the person of Charles Lenox Remond, whose eloquent appeals have extorted the highest applause of multitudes on
both sides of the Atlantic. Let the calumniators of the colored race despise themselves for their baseness and illiberality of spirit, and henceforth cease to talk of the natural inferiority of those who re-quire nothing but time and opportunity to attain to the highest point of human excellence.
It may, perhaps, be fairly questioned, whether any other portion of the population of the earth could have endured the privations, suffer-ings and horrors of slavery, without having become more degraded in the scale of humanity than the slaves of African descent. Nothing has been left undone to cripple their intellects, darken their minds, de-base their moral nature, obliterate all traces of their relationship to mankind; and yet how wonderfully they have sustained the mighty load of a most frightful bondage, under which they have been groan-ing for centuries! To illustrate the effect of slavery on the white man,—to show that he has no powers of endurance, in such a condi-tion, superior to those of his black brothers,—Daniel O’Connell, the distinguished advocate of universal emancipation, and the might-iest champion of prostrate but not conquered Ireland, relates the fol-lowing anecdote in a speech delivered by him in the Conciliation Hall, Dublin, before the Loyal National Repeal Association, March 31, 1845. “No matter,” said Mr. O’Connell, “under what specious term it may disguise itself, slavery is still hideous. It has a natural, an inevitable tendency to brutalize ev ery noble faculty of man. An American sailor, who was cast away on the shore of Africa, where he was kept in slav-ery for three years, was, at the expiration of that period, found to be imbruted and stultified—he had lost all reasoning power; and having forgotten his native language, could only utter some savage gibberish between Arabic and En glish, which nobody could understand, and which even he himself found dif fi culty in pronouncing. So much for the humanizing in flu ence of the domestic institution!” Admit-ting this to have been an extraordinary case of mental deterioration,
it proves at least that the white slave can sink as low in the scale of humanity as the black one.
Mr. Douglass has very properly chosen to write his own Narra-tive, in his own style, and according to the best of his ability, rather than to employ some one else. It is, therefore, entirely his own pro-duction; and, considering how long and dark was the career he had to run as a slave,—how few have been his opportunities to improve his mind since he broke his iron fetters,—it is, in my judgment, highly creditable to his head and heart. He who can peruse it without a tear-ful eye, a heaving breast, an afflicted spirit,—without being filled with an unutterable abhorrence of slavery and all its abettors, and ani-mated with a determination to seek the immediate overthrow of that execrable system,—without trembling for the fate of this country in the hands of a righteous God, who is ever on the side of the op-pressed, and whose arm is not shortened that it cannot save,—must have a flinty heart, and be quali fied to act the part of a trafficker “in slaves and the souls of men.” I am con fi dent that it is essentially true in all its statements; that nothing has been set down in malice, noth-ing exaggerated, nothnoth-ing drawn from the imagination; that it comes short of the reality, rather than overstates a single fact in regard to slavery as it is. The experience of Frederick Douglass, as a slave, was not a peculiar one; his lot was not especially a hard one; his case may be regarded as a very fair specimen of the treatment of slaves in Maryland, in which State it is conceded that they are better fed and less cruelly treated than in Georgia, Alabama, or Louisiana. Many have suffered incomparably more, while very few on the plantations have suffered less, than himself. Yet how deplorable was his situation! what terrible chastisements were in flicted upon his person! what still more shocking outrages were perpetrated upon his mind! with all his noble powers and sublime aspirations, how like a brute was he
treated, even by those professing to have the same mind in them that was in Christ Jesus! to what dreadful liabilities was he continually subjected! how destitute of friendly counsel and aid, even in his great-est extremities! how heavy was the midnight of woe which shrouded in blackness the last ray of hope, and filled the future with terror and gloom! what longings after freedom took possession of his breast, and how his misery augmented, in proportion as he grew re flective and intelligent,—thus demonstrating that a happy slave is an extinct man! how he thought, reasoned, felt, under the lash of the driver, with the chains upon his limbs! what perils he encountered in his endeav-ors to escape from his horrible doom! and how signal have been his deliverance and preservation in the midst of a nation of pitiless en-emies!
This Narrative contains many affecting incidents, many passages of great eloquence and power; but I think the most thrilling one of them all is the description Douglass gives of his feelings, as he stood soliloquizing respecting his fate, and the chances of his one day being a freeman, on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay—viewing the reced-ing vessels as they flew with their white wreced-ings before the breeze, and apostrophizing them as animated by the living spirit of freedom. Who can read that passage, and be insensible to its pathos and sublimity? Compressed into it is a whole Alexandrian library of thought, feeling, and sentiment—all that can, all that need be urged, in the form of expostulation, entreaty, rebuke, against that crime of crimes,—mak-ing man the property of his fellow- man! O, how accursed is that sys-tem, which entombs the godlike mind of man, defaces the divine im-age, reduces those who by creation were crowned with glory and honor to a level with four- footed beasts, and exalts the dealer in hu-man flesh above all that is called God! Why should its existence be prolonged one hour? Is it not evil, only evil, and that continually?
What does its presence imply but the absence of all fear of God, all regard for man, on the part of the people of the United States? Heaven speed its eternal overthrow!
So profoundly ignorant of the nature of slavery are many persons, that they are stubbornly incredulous whenever they read or listen to any recital of the cruelties which are daily in flicted on its victims. They do not deny that the slaves are held as property; but that terrible fact seems to convey to their minds no idea of injustice, exposure to outrage, or savage barbarity. Tell them of cruel scourgings, of mutila-tions and brandings, of scenes of pollution and blood, of the banish-ment of all light and knowledge, and they affect to be greatly indig-nant at such enormous exaggerations, such wholesale misstatements, such abominable libels on the character of the southern planters! As if all these direful outrages were not the natural results of slavery! As if it were less cruel to reduce a human being to the condition of a thing, than to give him a severe flagellation, or to deprive him of nec-essary food and clothing! As if whips, chains, thumb- screws, paddles, bloodhounds, overseers, drivers, patrols, were not all indispensable to keep the slaves down, and to give protection to their ruthless oppres-sors! As if, when the marriage institution is abolished, concubinage, adultery, and incest, must not necessarily abound; when all the rights of humanity are annihilated, any barrier remains to protect the vic-tim from the fury of the spoiler; when absolute power is assumed over life and liberty, it will not be wielded with destructive sway! Skeptics of this character abound in society. In some few instances, their incredulity arises from a want of re flection; but, generally, it in-dicates a hatred of the light, a desire to shield slavery from the assaults of its foes, a contempt of the colored race, whether bond or free. Such will try to discredit the shocking tales of slaveholding cruelty which are recorded in this truthful Narrative; but they will labor in vain. Mr.
